New Slains Castle

New Slains Castle stands on the North Sea cliffs of Aberdeenshire, about a kilometre east of the village of Cruden Bay, its roofless walls set hard against the drop to the water. The place grew from a tower house and courtyard raised around 1600 by Francis Hay, 9th Earl of Erroll, after his earlier stronghold, Old Slains, was destroyed on the orders of James VI in 1594. The Hay family, Earls of Erroll, held the castle for more than three centuries. It was extended in 1664, when it took the name New Slains, and its entrance front was renewed in 1707. In 1836 and 1837 the architect John Smith rebuilt it in the Scots Baronial style, and in the 1890s the landscape architect T. H. Mawson laid out its gardens. Bram Stoker knew this coast well, staying at Cruden Bay between 1892 and 1910 and naming the castle in his novels The Watter’s Mou’ and The Mystery of the Sea; the popular claim that Slains inspired Dracula is an internet myth, though its octagonal hall may lie behind the octagonal room in that book. The earls sold up in 1916, and the castle was unroofed and stripped for materials in 1925.